Putting Out Fire with Mid-Eastern Oil

"The U.S. is playing with fire, with nothing to put it out."

George Marshall opposed recognition of the new state of Israel in 1947 for strategic reasons: alienating Arab allies would eliminate an important strategic resource. The Secretary of State said Arab oil was necessary to American interests, and cahoots with Israel would interfere with that, possibly causing a geopolitical "fire."

But George, you don't put out fires with oil. So it's probably for the best that your access to that flammable Mid-Eastern crude was limited.

David McCulloch, Truman, pp. 604-05.

Wading in Sex/Combat

from Washington Monthly

Wading deep into the free-fire zone of modern sexuality, he has codified a remarkably systematic—and influential—set of ethics where traditional norms have fallen away.

Bejnjamin J. Dueholm offers a terrifically incisive critique of sex advice columnist Dan Savage. The author of Savage Love has saved more marriages then any priest in America, argues Dueholm, not because he has dispensed with old sexual mores, but because he has helped codify new ones. The climax of the piece is Dueholm's comparison of Savage's more liberated world with the deregulated, hyperconsumerist contemporary marketplace.

And I really liked being stopped dead in my tracks by the image of the openly gay columnist bravely immersing himself in a kind of violent sexual swamp.

50,000 Football Fans Screaming 'Vagina'

from Deadspin

Fans of the Oregon Ducks football team like to form an 'O' shape with their hands, indicating the letter of the alphabet that adorns their team's helmets.

The American Sign Language teacher at the university loves to point out that if your hands are not arranged in a rounded enough formation, you may be trying to say "Go Oregon" but really you're saying "vagina."

Little Engine with Wings

from Slate

One could even argue that [Michael] Lewis, having fallen in love with one story, missed a second, possibly more interesting one, in which the Little Engine That Could grows wings and flies too close to the sun (or something).

I like this description of a faux-underdog from a Moneyball review. Or maybe it's an underdog that becomes an overdog. Icarus turns up in funny places.

The New Originals

Originalism is the vision of the U.S. Constitution as having the same meaning that it had when it was signed. For centuries this argument had no purcahse at all on constitutional scholars, but then Edwin Meese invented it and Reagan appointed a right-wing Supreme Court justice. You know, the guy with the dictionary from 1787 on his desk.

Now crackpot ex-anchorman Glenn Beck is touting the eighteenth-century compact. He tops the charts with "The Original Argument: The Federalists' Case for the Constitution, Adapted for the 21st Century."

But hold on, Beck. How can you "adapt" the Constitution while at the same time insisting on the sanctity of its content in 1787? You can't get any more original than Original. Unless you're David St. Hubbins and Nigel Tufnel.

Sparks to be Tapped

from LA Times

President Obama called unemployed people "sparks waiting to be lit," whose ignition can set the economy ablaze. Then he said that they have "talent to be tapped."

This one bothered me because an unlit spark is a non-entity. Obama's effort to praise the value of these "churning" workers presents them as dumb flakes of antimatter. But then once these workers' productivity gets harnessed, you have a crackling fire, which is usually understood to be a destructive force.

The comparision harkened back to Bush 41's even vaguer "thousand points of light." These are American volunteer organizations with inspirational value. Praising volunteers is a pretty limp gesture for the leader of the free world, but it became his favorite slogan.

So both presidents recognize flickering particles of national importance. Sparks have thermal (economic?) value, while points of light are merely dazzling, inspiring, or disorienting.

Voters, our great nation in the year 2011 is a strobe light, a roman candle, a cornfield lit by fireflies, a supernova, the Burning Man playa, and a refracting disco ball. My opponent characterizes it as an Arizona wildfire, a box of strike-anywhere matches, and a recently-blowtorched saucepan of Bananas Foster.

The Fake Statue of Liberty

from the Christian Science Monitor

The Postal Service's new stamp has an image not of the statue in New York Harbor that welcomes the tempest-tost masses, but of the knockoff in Vegas, at the New York-New York casino that welcomes tourists with cash to burn. Since no one can tell the difference, the stamp will not be redesigned.

But it kind of gives me that "Dude, where's my country?" feeling to see this important symbol bowdlerized. On the other hand, the swaddled copper lady with the secular halo has not been initiating new Americans for a long time. They enter through airports, or on foot through the Mexican border.

New York-New York is probably the best example of a style of architectural obscenity that Las Vegas has pioneered: the jamming of an entire skyline into one building. The France-themed casino and the Excalibur also have kooky cosmetic projectiles. Beholding these casinos is really different than taking the Staten Island ferry past the Statue of Liberty, believe you me.

The Silent Mouth

from an interview with portraitist Donny Miller

How does he capture the right mood in his faces? "I change their emotions -- making them look unsure, or even mean, by drawing their eyebrows a different way. The mouth doesn't really say that much. What a person is really thinking is in the eyes."

The graphic designer discusses his work Beautiful People with Beautiful Feelings, an acerbic look at modern self-absorption. Like Ed Ruscha or Roy Liechtenstein, it's pop art with trenchant captions. But the quotes don't really come from the tearful faces -- they seem to emanate from some unseen essence, as in the work of Jenny Holzer. We humans think we use language to communicate, but to Miller, a silent face conveys more.

Brave New What?

from the National Review

The War Nerd beat me to Victor Davis Hanson, so I will spare you any summary of the work of America's most nauseating public intellectual. But I had to take issue with the above editorial. There is a consistent 180 degree difference in what Hanson is trying to say with the literary/historical allusions he employs to say it.

1) Title of article: Every Man a King. It's the borrowed slogan of America's most famous socialist tyrant. Who notably espoused an economic philosophy that runs directly counter to Hanson's neoliberal bent. Huey Long's vision never came to pass, but apparently the slogan can still be sloppily appropriated.

2) And then the cryptic assertion that thanks to widespread telecommunications technology, we now have access to L'Inferno. Are people using their phones to get familiar with medieval epic poetry? Or is access to this material only possible because of some new techno-breakthrough? Or maybe Hanson is suggesting that in spite of Lyndon Johnson's program of Civil Rights legislation, we can now take remote teleconference tours of our incipient eternal damnation?

3) Finally, Hanson pins his dismissal of the "archaic" notion of measuring wealth numerically by claiming that we live in a "brave new world." You see this Aldous Huxley reference all over the place. Usually the writer is only trying to vaguely suggest that things are different than the way they used to be. But the title was meant to be ironic, because the novel is about a hellish dystopia. The "brave new world" got to be that way because of the misuse of technology. The irony of which is lost on Hanson, who wants to celebrate how gadgetry can rid the world of social ills.

Ascendant Trolley

from Slate

Why is the trolley ascendant as the monorail declines?

This article compares the relative merits of trolleys and monorails. The key difference between these two modes of transport is that the monorail whizzes past you in the sky while the trolley rumbles alongside you, earthbound and familiar.

But when Tom Vanderbilt notes that the ground-based system is winning more approval than the sky-based one, he refers to the trolley as "ascendant." This spatial metaphor could mean that rather than gaining more popularity, there has instead been a trend of trolleys blasting off into the heavens, like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Streetcars also ascend, on page 2.

But what is a flying trolley, if not a monorail? And isn't a declining monorail a subway?

Deja Vu Lane

from New York Times

It’s a trip down déjà vu lane for the participants as well as the reader, as memories of how NBC nudged Johnny Carson into retirement and ambivalently passed over David Letterman in favor of Leno per­meate nearly every choice made this time around.

Conan O'Brien's usurpation of Jay Leno recalls when Leno himself surpassed David Letterman. So this stuff happens in cycles. Repetition. A second "trip down memory lane."

But as Heraclitus knew, it is impossible to step into the same river twice. What you knew as Memory Lane has been recolonized by some neural city planner. It's now Deja Vu Lane, and you're grasping at recollections instead of reality. TV is a dreamlife!

Mystery-Wrapped Riddles

from Winston Churchill's first wartime radio address

I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in mystery inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.

It cannot be in accordance with the interest or safety of Russia that Germany should plant upon the shores of the Black Sea, or that it should overrun the Balkan States and subjugate the Slavonic peoples of South-East Europe. That would be contrary to the historic life-interests of Russia. But here these interests of Russia fall into the same channel as the interests of Britain and France. None of these powers can afford to see Rumania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and above all Turkey, put under the heel of the Nazi buccaneers.

Through the fog of confusion and uncertainty we may discern quite plainly the community of interests which exists between England, France and Russia, to prevent the Nazis carrying the flames of war into the Balkans and Turkey. Thus (at some risk of being proved wrong by events) I will proclaim to-night my conviction that the second great fact of the first month of the war is that Hitler and all that Hitler stands for have been and are being warned-off the East and the South-east of Europe.

Churchill, in addition to his tactical genius, was apparently also a pastry chef. He liked his mystery-wrapped enigma-riddles with a schmear of the fog of uncertainty.

The strange thing about this overwrought and oft-misquoted speech is how unnecessary the description of Russia is. It's like he's saying, "I'm not sure what Sergei will do. But the key to what Sergei will do is finding out what he ought to do."

"Russian national interest" is said to underlie Russian wartime maneuvers. Which should be self-evident. Churchill was insisting on anti-Nazi solidarity while trying to keep the Russians at arm's length by suggesting that they are treacherous and irrational.

To me the main obfuscation in Churchill's speech is the conflation of a "national interest" with the machinations of a cabal of totalitarians. Even when the prime minister speaks of a democracy like "France," he is still reducing it to a homogeneous monolith. He doesn't even explain why a Nazi push east would hurt the West. Granted, war made us tend to band together, but on the other hand there were limits to that, as Churchill's treatment of Russia indicates.

So don't let anyone tell you your interests, folks. Least of all Winston Churchill.

What is a Hoe?

from TV's Jeopardy!

Trebek's answer was "this term for a long-handled gardening tool can also mean an immoral pleasure seeker." The expected question was "What is a rake?" but all-time champ Ken Jennings delivered a terrific double-entendre, made all the sweeter no doubt by his commanding lead over the other contestants. His Mormonism and aw-shucks persona contrast with this response.

Jennings' book about his Jeopardy! experience, which delves into the American subculture of trivia, deserves an MMM recommendation.

Bieber's Jewman

from TV

It looks like the Copyright Sheriff got to this video clip. But apparently an interviewer from New Zealand asked heartthrob Justin Bieber about a "German." Bieber got uncomfortable and said that we don't use that term in America. But the lad is not a moron -- he's just sensitive to discriminatory language. He thought his Kiwi interlocutor said "Jewman," which we indeed do not say in American English.

I had this friend from NZ who got a huge laugh every time he referred to "the deck" because it sounded to our North American ears like "the dick." As in, "Would you like to join me for a beer on the dick?"

Immunized Doctors

from Morrison v. MacNamara, District of Columbia Court of Appeals, 1979.

Quite apart from the locality rule's irrelevance to contemporary medical practice, the doctrine is also objectionable because it tends to immunize doctors from communities where medical practice is generally below that which exists in other communities from malpractice liability.

They used to hold doctors not to a national standard, but to a standard deemed reasonable for a practitioner within their community. Of course that meant that in worse-off parts of the country, quacks got away with a lot: they were "immunized" from negligence.

The word choice suggests a cabal of Bruce Banner-like scientists in lab coats, treacherously taking disease-fighting strength from their patients and slowly becoming legally invincible.

Unboyfriendable

from "All My Little Words" by the Magnetic Fields

Now that you've made me want to die
You tell me that you're unboyfriendable
And I could make you pay and pay
But I could never make you stay

Stephin Merritt is wordy, even by the standards of an indie rock songwriter. I doubt that Conor Oberst could pull off a five-syllable neologism, with the emphasis delicately placed upon the third, antepenultimate syllable.

The Magnetic Fields like to play with gender identity even within the confines of a conventional, Cole Porter-esque ditty. The fact that the speaker of this quatrain is gay makes "unboyfriendable" ambiguous. Is "to boyfriend" someone to convert them to a boyfriend, or to become their boyfriend? Could a straight man--an irresponsible party animal, say--be "ungirlfriendable?" Either way, Merritt's yearning will continue unabated.

The Iman Will Keep His Word

from the Associated Press

Florida pastor Terry Jones has been using the media to make Muslims angry. There's still a chance he may throw a Koran-burning party tomorrow, in spite of the efforts of cleric Muhammad Musri get Jones to douse his pyre.

I just heard on NPR Jones confiding to the press that he believes that "the Iman will keep his word." This indicates that although he knows enough about Islam to insult its millions of practitioners, he can't keep straight which word means holy man and which is the supermodel that also goes by Mrs. David Bowie.

Templates of Love

from "Those Shoes" by The Eagles

They’re lookin’ at you, leanin’ on you
Tell you anything you want to hear
They give you templates of love

The Long Run is The Eagles' most fully realized album, lyrically and musically. Henley, Frey et al. seem to have shed the country-tinged fakery of previous efforts and have embraced their own smooth hyper-commercial sound.

But they're not sleek to the point of omitting the obligatory tale of a sexy young woman headed down a perilous path. In "Those Shoes," the act from which she can't return is the slipping on of the sexy shoes. Soon, people in the drinking establishment are flattering her...but to what end?

The above lyrics sheet says that these sleazeballs offer her "tablets of love," which is clever: a small, easily dispensed dose of attention, which may actually be a drug that will get her hooked.

But I swear that it sounds like Don Henley sings "templates of love," which for some reason seems far richer in its ambiguity. The woman only receives the same formulas that everyone gets, instead of honest connection.

When the song later claims that "you can't believe your reviews," it becomes clear that the Eagles are not just officiating some woman's Friday night. They are analyzing the sycophantic and hype-driven corporate music world that they had just conquered.

I Want It To Be HAL

from Esquire

I call it the Internet of One. I want it to be mine, and I don't want to work too hard to get what I need. In a way, I want it to be HAL. I want it to learn about me, to be me, and cull through the massive amount of information that's out there to find exactly what I want.

At first blush it doesn't sound out of the ordinary for the confident new CEO of a technology company to use a classic sci-fi movie to illustrate her philosophy. HAL, from 2001: A Space Odyssey is a computer with a human psyche, and a marvel of hands-on artificial intelligence.

But Carol Bartz has forgotten the outcome of the movie, based on Arthur C. Clarke's novel. HAL malfunctions and kills the astronauts that he was supposed to be working for. Because HAL was programmed to ensure the success of the mission at any cost, the computer deemed fit to sacrifice Frank and Dave.

In this light, Google and Apple have never sounded better, since Bartz seems to be threatening her users with murder if they stand in the way of Yahoo's progress.

Robber of Dead Men's Dream

from Cabinet

Ern Malley caused a scandal amongst the Australian literati after World War II. Malley was not a poet at all but a hoax perpetrated by Harold Stewart and James McAuley. The two tricksters' intention was to expose an eagerness to find edgy modern poetic genius in what was worthless and arbitrary. They did not intend for Malley to continue to attract readers decades afterward.

In this piece in Cabinet, Christine Wertheim explores the continuing fascination of Malley the episode, Malley the poet, Malley the vehicle of cultural critique. Reprinted verbatim is Malley's poem "Durer: Innsbruck 1495," which was in fact written by McAuley and discarded only to be resurrected and then lavishly praised:

I had often, cowled in the slumberous heavy air,
Closed my inanimate lids to find it real,

As I knew it would be, the colorful spires

And painted roofs, the high snows glimpsed at 
 the back,

All reversed in the quiet reflecting waters—

Not knowing then that Dürer perceived it too.

Now I find that once more I have shrunk
To an interloper, robber of dead men’s dream,

I had read in books that art is not easy

But no one warned that the mind repeats

In its ignorance the vision of others. I am still

The black swan of trespass on alien waters.


What McAuley wrote as a fairly straightforward account of a poet admiring a painting became doubly ironic since the "interloper," the "black swan of trespass" and the "inanimate lids" all point to the nonexistence of the author.

When the author closes his eyes, either the painting or the reality is paradoxically revealed to him, and to us.

The "robber of dead men's dream" seems to suggest that reviving a centuries-old work of art could be construed as a crime. When Ern Malley was exposed as a fake, it was a vandalization of high culture. But when John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch revived Malley's reputation, the "robbery" proved a great gift.